That made those ten years the gangling teenage years of Indian music-awkward, experimental, hormonal, and mercurial. The best of times, the worst of times when grand orchestras, all shriek and bombast, yielded to a more refined use of electric guitar solos, piano and synth flourishes when the gentle, pabulum rhythm of dholkis and bongos gave way to sequenced drum machines and crunchy 4/4 bass thumps when the rigid distinction between sur and besur began to blur. Yes, some of those experiments fail, but when they work, you’ll notice an unmistakable swagger and strut. The music scene brashly tried on everything, unsure of what worked on its awkward frame, embarrassing itself in the bargain. If there was a common theme to all that transpired in the industry in that timespan, it was that Indian film music wanted to – and did – break out of its provincial roots and limited audience. By the end of those ten years, those 8-9 minutes had shrunk to a more manageable 4-6 minutes, and the film song, instead of being an excuse for a restroom break in the middle of the proceedings, became one of the reasons you would go watch a movie in the theater. In many ways, this decade embodied a period of dramatic change, a time when both the form and the market surrounding it somehow managed to brush off the grime and creakiness of the previous years.

All that remained were pale echoes of their vocal legacy, zombie nightingales, and the crazy disco hedonism brought about by Bappi Lahiri and Kalyanji/Anandji, in the First Age of synthesizers. But in general, the consensus was that the industry was broken, that the age of giants had gone with the passing of Messrs Rafi and Kumar. Yes, there were the annual musical blockbusters that shattered records and launched careers. Most film soundtracks followed a template 1 that had been unchanged for decades, sung, written and composed by folks who had either been around for decades or were too entrenched in the system to go beyond the commercial bottom-line.

Film music was kind of just there, playing on weekdays on National TV and All India Radio, heard in hotels and barbershops.

A far cry from the end of the previous decade, when the average Hindi song would suck 8-9 minutes of your life, and if you had the fortitude to stick with it to the end, your brain had either internalized this prolonged sonic assault, or found itself completely repulsed. Listen, the 90s were great for Indian music.

90s hindi songs playlist